Review: "You Know You Want This" by Kristen Roupenian

A book like Kristen Roupenian’s debut book of short stories, You Know You Want This, was published this year to great anticipation, with the story “Cat Person” being published in the right place (The New Yorker) and the right time (in the midst of the MeToo movement). I tend to steer clear of books with a clear political message, so when a friend bought me this book as a birthday present, I was both interested and a little hesitant as to whether it would live up to the hype or simply be an artifact of our current moment. Thankfully, I do not feel that is the case and found this book to be a little bit more complex than your average feminist screed. These are some of the creepiest stories I have come across in a while, reminding me of the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and Marina Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire but instead of Mexican history Roupenian is more preoccupied with how modern people fail to connect with one another, how things like paranoia, selfishness, our need to be loved and our overriding fear that we do not deserve such a thing take us down dark roads that we only realize lead to ruin and horror long when it is far too late. There is not a weak story here, although some I like more than others. The first story, “Bad Boy” about a couple who find that they get off watching their male friend drift in and out of a toxic relationship and can only have sex in the process of humiliating him is a good primer for what is too follow, the banal horror of the situation Roupenian deviously crafts only showing its ugly face when we are too far to go back. The stories take a welcome strange turn with “Sardines”, about a lonely divorced woman, her daughter and the results of her daughter’s birthday wish has echoes of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” in its grotesque ending. I also feel I have a differing view on a handful of stories than other readers might, such as “The Good Guy” about the inner thoughts of a man whose sexual shame, pitiful submissive nature and failure to be honest with himself turns him into a callous monster, “Biter” about a woman’s obsession with biting one of her male co-workers which has the book’s best ending and the aforementioned “Cat Person”. Far from casting women as victims or men as villains or worse, foils, Roupenian uses the aberrant relationships in these and the rest stories to interrogate modern romance, its focus on selfish need and instant gratification and frames it as the kind of horror story Shirley Jackson would right which makes you question every misinterpreted sexual encounter, every awkward first date, every affectionate gesture from the opposite sex as something sinister, masking one’s darker desires that they have talked themselves into justifying. This is the kind of incendiary, thought provoking and original short story collection that reinvigorates my love for this lost art form. 

Rating: 5/5